Dynamic Arrows

[Richard Rowell <rwrowell bellsouth net>]

I have been hacking on a way to allow "arrows" to be loaded at runtime  
rather then hardcoded.  Each arrow is made up of "strokes" where each stroke 
can be a line, polyine, bezier curve/path, circle, ellipse, or a polygon with 
filled and non-filled options where appropriate.  Most all of the rendering 
stuff is in place and seems to work great, prints well, exports well (to PNG 
at least), etc.

The next part I'm going to hack in is the loading of the "arrow" file or 
files.  If the powers at be think this piece of code might be incorporated 
into the "core" code, then I would like suggestions on issues such as:

1.  Where a good place to initialize the list would be.
2.  Is there a preferred method of storage for global lists such as this. 
3.  What to do if an arrow is specified in a document that the local machine 
doesn't have?
4.  Should Dia embed non-standard arrow definitions into the saved document 
to avoid #3?
...

_________________________
Richard Rowell
rwrowell@bellsouth.net

If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves 
upon execution. - Robert Sewell